Connelly: "I've always wanted to understand people."

Connelly: "People who are incapable of having any kind of intimate relationship have to turn to feeling this incredible hunger and void, have to turn to some quantifiable external product to make them feel whole."

Connelly: "Every job I do, I feel like it is an amazing opportunity. I try to throw myself into every role with everything I have."

Connelly: "I try to understand the reasons why people find themselves in these situations and try to understand why people make these kinds of choices that we think are reprehensible."

Connelly: "I'm very hard on myself. I don't want to disappoint myself or other people. I need to have a high standard all the time; I can't mess up."

Connelly: "I can't comment on any outside perception. I'm happy to come out and talk about movies that I've worked on in a setting like this. Otherwise, I have my own life that I live which is very different and private."

Connelly: "I'm a bit of an overachiever, kind of a disciplinarian and hard on myself."

Connelly: "I was an overly polite teenager, and it didn't serve me particularly well. I wanted to be good and be nice and be a peacemaker. I think it made me precocious on one level and stunted on another."

Connelly: "People are really important. And, for me, the connections we have to one another are more important than anything."

Connelly: "The thing that really matters to me is well-being and happiness. Maybe it comes from knowing people who have tortured themselves trying to meet these strangely narrow and rigorous definitions of what our culture thinks is beautiful."

Connelly: "If you get too attached to how you want it to come out the other side, you freeze. I try to trust that it will work out in the end."

Connelly: "I appreciate inconsistencies and contradictions. ... Everyone I know has contradictions in their personalities. I'm absolutely drawn to that."

Connelly: "I don't want to put happiness off to the future, because you never know what life will bring."

Connelly: "Growing up, being watched from the outside... it's kind of very taxing and maybe I should just do some kind of manual labor - it might be more relaxing. But I can't, it's not in my nature."

Connelly: "I'll probably at some point get involved in Instagram and things like that because I feel it's reality, and it's the way people communicate."

Connelly: "We equate beauty for women with youth, and that's sad. It's a shame it's so hard for so many of us to appreciate the beauty of an older woman and to accept it in ourselves."

Connelly: "I try to stay focused on my life and do try not to be brought into the Hollywood fantasy."

Connelly: "I try to do a lot of research beforehand so I know where I want to go with a scene. I try not to get too stressed about it, because I find that's the worst thing."

Connelly: "Once I'm comfortable with someone, I'm not reserved. I'm a compulsive confessor."

Connelly: "I wasn't brought up with any religion at all. At school and in my early 20s, I read every religious text I could get my hands on - Buddhist scriptures, Hindu texts, the Qur'an, and the Bible. I wanted to feel like something made sense to me, that there was something sacred I could feel aligned with."

Connelly: "As I get older, I have a clearer sense of what's important to me."